Absolutely. It took me a while to realize that I hated web development and why: because of all the layers of stuff you have to deal with on top of that document fetching platform. Something as simple as maintaining a login session is a complicated problem, even before you get into validating users, single sign-on, etc. You can put a lot of that out-of-sight/out-of-mind by letting a framework deal with it, but it's still there, lurking, waiting to bite you. And that's just one small aspect of building a web app.

It's too bad Java sucked so much. Maybe we could have had applets that worked like desktop apps, keeping the app-type stuff within applets and leaving the document reader alone. Probably not.